Page 17 of Born for Lace

My heart pounds.

His presence immediately suffocates me, and a hazy memory tumbles back to light. I was lifted, carried, and his face hovered over me. There was blood on the walls?—

Spero!

“Where is my baby!” I bark, scampering to my feet, bracing myself for a fight with a seven-foot monster of a man. I was wrong. I can’t trust him. I was wrong, and Maple was wrong to trust me.

Lagos’ intense stare pushes me backward until I feel something at my feet. My eyes cut to the floor and when I see mybeibao, I squat to find the small hacksaw from within it.

“It’s not your baby,” he says.

Fuck.He knows.

“Where is he?” I fumble with the saw, my stomach clenching with fear.

“Alive,” he states plainly.

“I will hurt you,” I warn, straightening and wielding the weapon in front of me. And with him sitting and me standing, we are almost the same height. “I will,” I repeat, glaring at him.

He huffs. “A papercut.”

My eyes grow as I look between the massive Xin De male and thetinyhacksaw, reality sinking in.

“Tomar,” I spit out. “Where is Tomar? We had a deal.” Retorts stack on my tongue, desperate lies and warnings.

“Maplehad a deal.Yougot on a boat with two strangers, and that fucking Shadow baby. Then the second you’re on your own, you offer yourself and the fucking infant up to an Endigo. You lied to us! There is no deal anymore.”

Glaring at me, he leans back, unaffected by the way I brandish the shiny, serrated implement.

“Shadow baby?” The term slithers under my skin along with his demand from earlier: ‘Kill it.’

I edge away from the bed, gaining a better stance, trying to figure this all out.

“You don’t know, do you, Lace Girl?” His dark utterance pours down my spine like liquid ice.

Oh, God.What?

What does he know?

“Don’t know what?” I ask.

Lagos’ onyx-coloured gaze rolls over me. I can barely decipher his pupil from his iris. As he takes in the hacksaw and my defensive position, the corner of his mouth lifts in what might be considered cruel amusement if he were human, but he isn’t. Humanity has been engineered out of him, paired with thousands of years of evolution and gene manipulation, and there it is— what he is.

A heartless Xin De male.

"You’re a bit feisty to be a Lace Girl.”

“Well—" I shuffle, holding the saw higher, feeling the weight of his presence like a blanket that snuffs out the air. “You're awfully brutish to be consideredevolved,” I punch out, shocked by the strength in my tone.

His grin falls. “Evolved.”

“What’s a Shadow baby?” I demand. He knows something about Maple’s baby. Maybe he knows why The Trade can’t find it, or maybe Tomar does. I have to know.

He rises to his feet, his sheer, bulking height forcing me backward a step to keep eye contact. Without another word, he walks to the door. To him, the conversation is over.

Oh, no, it isn’t.

“Tell me!”

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